edit – no doubt focussed on celebrating your run of luck

It must be almost time for a new PM too? we’ve had this one for months

guess its possible that their methodology has been broken since 2010..

like the low figures for lib dems in yougov…

That’s a completely different problem to statistical sampling error, which is what the Margin of Error measures. That happens because either:
a) There’s a systematic problem with the way YouGov attracts people to their panel, gets them to respond and weights the responses they get which is underestimating the real level of support.
…or…
b) Hardly anybody wants to vote for the LibDems any more.

I follow Japanese politics on and off.

so maybe its better to compare urban/poverty/gang related murders…

i.e. homicide rate per population is not particularly meaningful taken in isolation

or :

It’s unhelpful to have lots of polls with the same methodology, because
the probability of getting the same rogue effect caused by inherent sampling/weighting problems will not be decreased by repeated sampling

like the low figures for lib dems in yougov…

but perhaps yougov will be vindicated in the next set of real elections…

Thanks for the answers by the way. Do you follow Japanese politics, or is that a bridge too far/just not particularly interesting?

It’s helpful to have lots of polls with the same methodology, because the probability of getting the same rogue effect by chance decreases dramatically with each day that it repeats.

And now I’m departing

Toodles……

http://www.citizensreportuk.org/reports/murders-fatal-violence-uk.html

given that that’s going to happen by chance sometimes, how can you separate the random effect from any real change in opinion?

maybe if the sun really wanted to get a good idea of what’s going on in the nation, weekly polls from a couple of different pollsters with different methods might be good…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/feb/04/jeremy-bamber-murders-ballistics-challenge

you might like to spin that as the effect of 50 or whatever years of labour administration in Glasgow, or you might not.

anecdotally I’d say outside of certain specific locations, I’ve generaelly felt safer in Scotland than in England

Of course, that Labour and Tories received crates of Peroni in gratitude for voting the previous proposal down may have played a part.

You need to do some different maths to find out how likely it is that you’ll get multiple polls wrong due to sampling error in succession. If you poll every day for 10 years, I guess you’d expect this to happen from time to time, sometimes in opposite directions and sometimes in the same direction.

BTW these MoE numbers tend be a bit of an over-simplification, because the pollsters aren’t really polling the population randomly; They’re doing various things to make sure their sample matches the demographics of the population they’re polling, some of which will increase the margin of error and some of which will reduce it.

The interesting thing about doing daily polls is that it gives you some idea of reactions to particular events. If they only poll once a month, it’s harder to tell which of various different factors is driving a change.

Comparison of the proportion of crime made up by the different crime groups in Scotland and in England and Wales showed 75% of crime in Scotland was property crime compared with 77% of crime in England and Wales (Chaplin, 2011). Within that:
32% of crime in Scotland was vandalism compared with 22% in England and Wales;7% of crime in Scotland was motor vehicle theft related incidents compared with 12% in England and Wales;3% of crime in Scotland was housebreaking, compared with 8% in England and Wales; [30]19% of crime in Scotland was other household theft and 14% was personal theft (a combined 33%). In England and Wales 35% were other thefts, which incorporated these two categories.
25% of crime in Scotland was violent crime. This compares with 23% of crime measured by the BCS in England and Wales being violent crime 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/homicide-violent-death-is-twice-as-common-in-scotland-as-in-england-and-wales-1138251.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jun/16/drugsandalcohol.justice

If you want to support the assertions of another poster – no matter how foolish they are – it would help if your post had at least some vague relationship to the point that they were trying to make.

suspect the overall trends would look exactly the same if the sampling was once a week or once a month, so guess yougov is wasting their money, and the sun’s…

If they were using a fixed panel and asked them each day, and the same people replied each time, then your criticism would hold.

And there you go again. Here is one impartial Scottish Tory observations about Scottish Labour and the SNP when it came to two totally different election results in two completely different Parliaments at both ends of the country.

The two elections were fought under two entirely different voting systems one year apart.
The Labour campaign in the GE was far superior to that of the SNP, and it showed the prominence that they placed on this election instead of the Holyrood election a year later. Scottish Labour sends its best talent to Westminster, and the most ambitious of their politicians would prefer to go there.
The SNP campaign in the Scottish elections was far superior to that of Scottish Labour, and it showed in the prominence that they placed on this election instead of the GE a year earlier. And the SNP would prefer to keep its most talented politicians here at Holyrood.

Scottish Labour will continue to see the next GE as the next big battle despite a looming Independence Referendum before it, they have a lot of seats to defend. The SNP on the other hand, will be far more focussed on retaining their big Holyrood election gains and that majority they now have the following year. The money, time and investment will only stretch so far with two looming elections one year apart. And it won’t take a ‘genius’ to work out where the biggest resources in both parties will be directed. JUST LIKE LAST TIME.

And on the issue of nailed on predictions before elections. Alex Salmond’s decision to focus solely on winning a Holyrood seat by constituency FPTP caused much discussion on this site. And yet, I don’t remember one Scottish poster from any other party who didn’t predict that he would be nailed onto win that seat without needing to rely on the list. All it took was a general knowledge of the voters previous inclinations in that constituency and that particular politician. I don’t remember anyone calling us ignorant for thinking that at the time even when they didn’t believe it was that clear cut.

Dear God.  The actual reasons the 2010 election was so out of kilter with other elections in Scotland were as follows (in order of importance) -

1) The SNP’s total exclusion from the leaders’ debates.
2) The tightness of the polls, making the electorate think they could keep the Tories out but only if they voted Labour.
3) The fact that the SNP can’t form a government at Westminster. 
4) Support for Gordon Brown.

Your concentration on the past is also wholly irrelevant.

Those who understand Scottish politics (a group from which you sadly exclude yourself) understand that a significant shift happened in May 2011. I recognise that there is no certainty as to how that will play in a UK GE. You are so miserably ignorant, that you insist that the past must repeat itself.